Industry Professional
How to Plan for Product Updates
- By Bruce Czerwinski
- Feb 01, 2018
Making changes to an existing product is more
than adding a tweak here and a new feature
there. It is listening and responding to customer
needs that keeps products fresh and relevant.
Every issue of Security Today includes pages of
updated products, but how does this process really work?
Aiphone’s new modular emergency towers are a good example.
Here’s a peek at how the company arrived at our recently enhanced
towers.
Behind the Curtain
Aiphone encourages team members to ask customers what they do
and don’t like about the products. That feedback leads to suggestions
for improvements. Ideas are filtered by the New Products Planning
Committee (NPPC), including members of engineering, purchasing,
sales, technical support, production and marketing teams. The group
meets regularly to pursue the most promising suggestions.
“Customers were asking for a CCTV arm on top of the towers,”
Derek McNeill, a Redmond, Wash.-based engineering supervisor
and member of the NPPC, said. “It would allow a second camera
to provide security personnel with another line of sight to more accurately
assess and respond to situations.”
Committee members from the sales team said customers also
wanted a UL Listed electrical box to easily satisfy countless industry,
state and local electrical codes. An engineer also shared some
customer ideas to help installations go faster: add built-in mounting
hardware for power supplies or other accessories and hinged access
panels to make it simple to pull wire between the two- or threetower
modules.
The ideas looked promising, so the engineering department asked
NPPC for permission to move forward and start designing these changes.
“We start with a concept design that also includes looking at the
budget and production timetable,” McNeill said. “The NPPC reviewed
our work and gave us the okay to go to the prototype phase.”
Aiphone designs and manufactures its intercom products. But in
this case, it turned to a trusted partner in the Seattle area to create the
formed sheet metal structure needed to complete a working model.
The NPPC, visiting sales team and Aiphone’s chairman were eager to
review the prototypes.
Seeing is believing, and after evaluating the unit the team members
were confident they could sell the new, enhanced modular tower
and CCTV arm module. With that, the various Aiphone departments
approved the project. The engineering department had an enthusiastic
thumbs-up.
“It was time to create final drawings and order another prototype,
which we call our pre-production model,” McNeill said. “We decided
to make improvements, such as added welds to make the tower much
stronger. That last model looked good and I got the go-ahead to begin
production.”
About this time, committee members approved the use of a UL
Listed electrical box in Aiphone’s emergency wall-mount enclosures.
Aiphone’s attention to detail means taking the time to get things
right the first time. From the initial NPPC meeting to the first sale of
the new towers took about 15 months.
Changes Around the World
Aiphone is a 70-year-old Japanese-based company that’s done
business in the United States since 1970. The company also has subsidiary
offices in the U.K., France, Australia, China and Singapore
with sales in more than 70 countries around the world.
Each region has the flexibility to add features to meet the specific
needs of their customers and end users. Often changes in one region
spread to others. Yet that’s not always the case, McNeill said.
“For example, since vandalism is often a problem in the U.S.,”
McNeill said. “We make changes to the Japanese version by adding
vandal-resistant face plates to our intercoms.”
The new emergency towers are considered a U.S. product, but will
also be sold in Canada and Mexico. It may not be long before they’re
being sold globally.
Things never slow down in engineering and McNeill has already
moved on to his next assignment. He said it’s little too early to talk about
his next project, but hinted that it had to do with a more advanced adaptor
to handle a wider variety of legacy Aiphone intercoms.
This article originally appeared in the February 2018 issue of Security Today.
About the Author
Bruce Czerwinski is the vice president of sales at Zenitel.